While it appears that a lot of thought was put into this proposal and theoretically it would work to a degree, I'm generally not a fan of any ideas which remove or cripple anyone else's ability to use the network. The Gnutella network is supposed to be an open and free network. Participating freely on the network should not rely on whether someone has uploaded anything at all.

All in all, using this proposal I forsee those people with T1 and higher getting the most preferencial treatment above all. They are ultimately the ones who can provide the throughput and the bandwidth necessary to share and to still download with no degradation to their service. And, with large (or even non-existent) bandwidth limits I'm sure, they can afford to share all they want and ultimately gain a high HEN.

I see a lot of modem users being hurt the most because ultimately, it's hard to share and to download at the same time. Personally, if I were a modem user, I would be most concerned with finding and getting the files I needed and then disconnecting... I wouldn't want to worry about sharing my files with others because sharing while I'm downloading just hurts my downloading. Therefore I would probably never reach a high HEN.

And then there are people in my situation. I may have a broadband DSL connection, but I also have a bandwidth limit on it. While I do share a lot, there are times when I may be downloading rather large files and my bandwidth limit doesn't allow me to get what I want and still upload to others. If that were the case, my HEN would probably be low and my chances of being disconnected from a host while downloading are increased dramatically and most possibly because of a T3 user who has a higher HEN wanting to download files from the same host I'm connected to.

At any rate, this is just my 2 cents on the subject.